Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesThursday, November 12
From the desk
Start with Seymour Hersh. For twenty months the Army called My Lai a victory over the Viet Cong. Then Hersh's story of November 13, 1969, reached six major papers and reported that Charlie Company had murdered unarmed civilians. Worth a longer look is 1971, when Nixon set February 1, 1972, as the deadline to bring home 45,000 more troops. Whether South Vietnam's army could hold without them was still unanswered. Read the two together. The second is partly the first's aftermath.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1969Featured · This day in history
Seymour Hersh's story of the My Lai killings goes out to American newspapers
For twenty months, the Army's account of March 16, 1968, had been a victory over Viet Cong forces in a Vietnamese village. On November 12, 1969, independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the real story: soldiers of Charlie Company had murdered unarmed civilians at My Lai. The report went out through the Dispatch News Service and was picked up by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Seattle Times, and Newsday. The cover-up had failed, and the public argument over the war now included what American soldiers had done.
Americans argued over what their army had done, and over whether the press should have reported it. Coverage of Vietnam grew more independent of official sources and began to examine other atrocities. Hersh's work earned the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Did you know
QWhere exactly did Charlie Company's killing take place, and how large was the toll?
My Lai was really two hamlets. The killing happened in the hamlets of Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khê, part of Sơn Mỹ village in Quảng Ngãi province, South Vietnam. The dead numbered between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, and the count is still uncertain. The men responsible belonged to Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division, known as the Americal Division. Captain Ernest Medina commanded the company. The shorthand that entered American newspapers in November 1969 was the name of just one of the two hamlets.
QWhat did the helicopter pilot who landed at My Lai say he saw from the air?
Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., the helicopter pilot, did more than watch. He and his helicopter crew set down near an irrigation ditch where civilians were being killed, led civilians out of a nearby bunker, and pulled a young girl from the ditch. Thompson described the scene in blunt words: "It's mass murder out there. They're rounding them up and herding them in ditches and then just shooting them." The ditch was one of the places where civilians had been executed. His account sits against the Army's early report, which claimed a victory over Viet Cong forces. The Army published the victory report.
QWhich question did a New York Times columnist pose about whether the press should print the My Lai story at all?
James Reston of The New York Times put the case against publication as a single long question. Should whatever happened in the massacre be reported by press, radio and television, he asked, "since clearly reporting the murder of civilians by American soldiers helps the enemy, divides the people of this country, and damages the ideal of America in the world?" The sentence gathers every argument for silence in one place. Reston was stating the objection in order to answer it. Representative Albert Watson's complaint about demagogues in the news media came from the same worry.
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1997government
Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing
Nearly five years after a van bomb went off beneath the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef was found guilty in Manhattan on November 12, 1997, of masterminding it. The bombing on February 26, 1993, had killed six civilians and injured 1,042. The trial opened August 3 and put more than 100 witnesses before the court, along with chemical and fingerprint evidence and telephone records. Witnesses also described bomb-making in Jersey City. Eyad Mahmoud Ismoil Najim, tried alongside him, was convicted of driving the van.
The case treated an attack on American soil as a crime to be proved with fingerprints, phone records, and witnesses in a federal courtroom in the city that was hit. Prosecution, not retaliation, was the American response here, and the Yousef verdict became the second major conviction in that effort.
Did you know
QWhat was packed into the Ryder van besides the main explosive charge?
The main charge was urea nitrate, laced with particles of aluminum, magnesium, and ferric oxide. Around it sat a set of booster explosives: nitroglycerine, ammonium nitrate dynamite, smokeless powder, and fuse. Then came the oddest ingredient, three tanks of bottled hydrogen, included to enhance the fireball. The device was assembled by Yousef with Mohammed Salameh and Mahmud Abouhalima in his home on Pamrapo Avenue in Jersey City. It was a bomb designed with chemistry in mind, not just tonnage, and that is partly why chemical evidence carried so much weight with jurors years later.
QHow big was the hole the blast tore in the garage floors?
The explosion generated an estimated pressure of 150,000 pounds per square inch and opened a hole about 100 feet wide through four sublevels of concrete. The device weighed roughly 1,500 pounds, and its builders had a specific hope for it: that detonating beneath Tower One would knock the North Tower into the South Tower and bring both down, killing thousands. The towers stayed up. The garage, a place most visitors never thought about, took the damage that was meant for the buildings above it.
QWhy were so many of the injured hurt after the bomb had already gone off?
The blast instantly severed the World Trade Center's main electrical power line, which knocked out the emergency lighting system as well. People inside the towers were left in the dark, and smoke rose as high as the 93rd floor of both buildings. Most of the more than 1,000 injuries happened during the evacuation, as tens of thousands of occupants made their way down stairwells without light. Among the six people killed was a pregnant mother. The failure of the backup systems was part of what the damage assessment later made plain.
2022tragedy
Two warbirds collide above 4,000 spectators at the Wings Over Dallas airshow
At 1:22 p.m. on November 12, 2022, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra collided in mid-air during the Wings Over Dallas airshow at Dallas Executive Airport. More than 4,000 spectators had gathered for a show timed to Veterans Day commemorations. The P-63, in a descending banked turn onto the runway approach, struck the B-17, the Texas Raiders, on its rear port quarter from above. Both aircraft broke apart and burned. All six aboard were killed: five on the bomber and the fighter's pilot. No one on the ground was hurt.
The crash exposed a gap in American aviation oversight: the FAA had no guidance or requirements for air bosses, the people who direct the sky at air shows. The NTSB's recommendations called for standard operating procedures and air boss evaluations. It was also the Commemorative Air Force's first fatal accident in 17 years, and it took one of the few airworthy B-17s.
Did you know
QWhat was Daniel Ragan's job on the Navy's version of the B-17?
Ragan was a radio operator. In the 1950s, as a U.S. Navy veteran of the Korean War, he served as a radio operator aboard the PB-1W, the naval variant of the B-17. He was a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who lived in Dallas. Of the five people aboard the Texas Raiders, his service was the oldest on the record: the next-earliest listed, Terry Barker's Army helicopter flying, began in 1975, more than two decades after Ragan's Navy radio work. He had spent his military years at a radio set inside a close relative of the aircraft that carried him on his last flight.
QWhat air show role had pilot Craig Hutain flown before Dallas?
Hutain was a pilot for the "Tora! Tora! Tora!" air show reenactment of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a performance that put vintage aircraft through staged attack passes before a crowd. He had started flying solo at 17. His professional career ran through Rocky Mountain Airways from 1982 to 1985 and United Airlines from 1985 to 2022, the year of the crash. In Dallas he was the only person aboard the P-63, the third and last fighter in a three-aircraft trail.
QHow rare were the two aircraft that collided over Dallas?
The fighter, registered N6763, was a P-63F-1-BE, and it was one of only two examples of the P-63F variant ever built. The bomber, registered N7227C, was a B-17G-95-DL built by Douglas at Long Beach, and it was one of the few Flying Fortresses still airworthy. So the two aircraft that met over Dallas Executive Airport were a near-unique fighter and a survivor from a very small fleet of flying bombers. The collision removed both from the sky in a single moment, and neither flies again.
